


Subjects Matter

by Cymbidia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Artist Steve, M/M, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:52:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymbidia/pseuds/Cymbidia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite having been the subject of close scrutiny by intelligence agencies, historians, and adoring five year olds for some seventy odd years, there were two big secrets to Steve Rogers that had been kept for all this time — the true nature of his relationship with one James Buchanan Barnes, and the identity of the famous artist known by the pseudonym Stephen Lagrange.<br/>Steve outs himself as an artist, and in the process of keeping his online portfolio updated, he gets Bucky back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Subjects Matter

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't picked up a paintbrush since tenth grade, so please forgive any technical inaccuracies. There is one instance of the f-slur near the very end, so warnings for that. I feel like this fic has surprisingly little bucky, even though it's really just Steve thinking about him the entire time.

Despite having been the subject of close scrutiny by intelligence agencies, historians, and adoring five year olds for some seventy odd years, there were two big secrets to Steve Rogers that had been kept for all this time — the true nature of his relationship with one James Buchanan Barnes, and the identity of the famous artist known by the pseudonym Stephen Lagrange. (A surname he'd picked because it meant "the barn" which made Bucky laugh).

"Mrs Stevie Barnes, huh," Bucky had said, sitting in a thin white undershirt by the window, his face illuminated by the yellow of a bare bulb and the silver of the city outside. He held a cigarette carelessly in his rough calloused hands, eyes crinkling with the bright perfect smile he reserved almost exclusively for Steve. "I thought you had your heart set on Buck Rogers, Stevie."  
His hair was just long enough to tuck behind his ear, glossy from the tonic he'd brushed through his hair that morning, but loose and soft from a day's worrying and wear. A single strand of it fell into his eyes, and Bucky tucked it behind his ear in a careless motion, easy and graceful. The motion was somehow so strangely intimate that Steve felt a thrill of electricity run up his spine, his eyes rooted to Bucky's fingers, calloused from the docks and smudged with grease from the garage. Steve had swallowed, and Bucky's eyes had flickered to Steve's mouth, the motion of his throat, and then Bucky gave Steve another one of his perfect, eye crinkling smiles, and leaned forward and—.

Steve had used the name because it had amused Bucky, and at first he'd kept it a secret because most of the early work attributed to that name were pieces of fancy he amused himself with while he tried, as Steven Rogers, to make a name for himself with more commercial projects. Then, later, when it had started receiving more attention, he'd just kept with it. When he was chosen for Project Rebirth, it became classified. Before Steve had gone to war, he worked in many mediums, primarily oil and acrylic on canvas, but when he was on the move, Steve was limited to smaller pieces, since it wasn't like he could lug around big canvases on tour. Then, then, Steve had gone to war, and all he could draw with was pencil and sketchbook, with the occasional piece in ink or colour when he had time on base. It was these works which were best received, honest in their emotion, elegant in their economy, their portrayal of war raw in their emotional depths. Portraits of soldiers, of weapons, landscapes riddled with the marks of war. Deep, dark forests eery in their hostility. Labs and bunkers. An impression of the alps, a train, unpopulated by any human figure but almost violent with grief and shock. The SSR and later SHIELD had classified the identity of the artist of the works, because some of his more unorthodox missions had been classified right through the end of the Cold War, but Peggy made sure the works themselves got the attention they deserved, even if they couldn't be attributed to Steve Rogers. Steve didn't mind not being credited, but Natasha encouraged him, and Tony had once given him one of his own paintings, an early one of the view of Brooklyn from his fire escape, in a well meaning attempt to make him feel more at home.

He posted online the works that had been classified because of his identity, portraits of Peggy and the howlies, hydra bases dashed through with streaks of blue, an operating table, the Vita-Ray machine grand and terrible, a handful of uncomfortable and dysphoric self portraits of both versions of his body, from soon after his transition, and in the same theme, a funhouse mirror. A rare acrylic on canvas piece, rough and looking half finished, but all the more terrifying, pencil sketches with a spatter of red, the Red Skull's hideous visage peeking through behind skinny Steve's terrified face. Prisoners of hydra, human experiments, a pot of meat stew, sad and distant and nauseating, and reams and reams of Bucky, every expression lovingly catalogued, every hurt carefully soothed in graphite and ink and acrylic. Steve's art helped him to process his emotions, during the war and before, and Steve felt very strongly about Bucky.

Steve also puts up some of what he's been working on since he has been defrosted. A triptych of oil on canvas of the tesseract, first suspended in midair, in the Red Skull's plane, caught in the moment just after Schmidt had disappeared. The second was a dream Steve had of being frozen, the pale blue and white of ice, and the eerier glow of a shape just under it. the third was the tesseract on top of Stark Tower, the gaping maw of space above, a wrecked city below, the impression of violence and invasion without living beings populating the painting.

Steve also painted the memorial of Captain America and the Howling Commandos in Arlington, with any signs of himself removed, a gaping absence. Steve also debates on whether to burn the too detailed piece of a hand, reaching up and grasping, distant and desperate, but he doesn't, and he puts it online, and he can't bring himself to find out what anyone thinks of it.

Pepper Potts sends him an enthusiastic email about his art, to which he gives politely grateful reply. Several galleries want to host exhibitions, and although Steve would probably have given an arm and a leg for the opportunity before the war, he declines it now, because he has a sneaking suspicion the offers were more to do with his name than his art. Natasha sends him a stack of books about depictions of WWII in art, with yellow sticky notes marking the sections about his work peeking out the side, and very occasional green ones, where he or someone he knew had been the subject of the art. Some one had painted him naked, erotically draped with the American flag, which made him uncomfortable, but it was in a pair with another of Bucky in the same, the only two commandos to die in service or something, and Steve traces a careful finger over the contour of Bucky's face, cataloging the accuracy of the rendition for long long moments, before he snapped the book shut and ran for three straight hours.

The Smithsonian holds an exhibit on his life, conveniently just as he moves to DC, and wants some of his work, so Steve gives them a few pieces, and he asks Tony (pepper) to lend the pieces they owned (some of his best, he secretly thought, especially the forests, and, loathe as he was to mention it, the train.) The Smithsonian borrows around from collectors and museums, for both his work as Stephen Lagrange and the handful of sketchbooks and commercial pieces he'd done as Steve Rogers. They rustle up quite a little collection, though the kids on school trips weren't as impressed by them as they were the old uniforms and the before-and-after display, or even the grainy video of that cringe worthy dance number.  
He has better things to worry about for a while, with the crash of the helicarriers. When he can sit up without wincing, he paints and sketches:the helicarriers in smoke; a view under the water of the Potomac, sunlight filtering through the wreckage; a blurry figure walking away. The span of mechanical wings in the sky, a flash of red hair. A hospital vending machine. The sleek dangerous form of a metal arm, a red star on the shoulder. A bridge, wrecked cars, once again devoid of human figures but still full of violence. The bunker they find afterwards, the chair, tinged with fear and nausea. An obsessive recreation of the photo of Bucky from his file, face behind the window of his tank, blank and sleeping without a hint of peacefulness. Alexander Pierce, smiling his charming smile, every brushstroke filled with anger.

There is the Ultron business, of course, and Steve dedicated a few pieces to a floating city in the sky and clear canisters of vibranium and the impression of motion, silver and red.  
But mostly, the Tumblr and Flickr accounts where he posts these pieces is filled with pictures of Bucky, new and old. Steve goes to Europe to take down old Hydra bases and look for clues about Bucky, and in between, Steve draws those too, obliquely, so as not to give away anything classified. They give up after a few fruitless months, and Steve returns to DC. He spends a month shut up in his house, obsessively trying to sketch out his favourite memories of Bucky from age 4 onwards, right up to Bucky holding his shield, moments before—

He spends a month on nothing but Bucky. He ought to have felt a little obsessed or vaguely crazed, he supposed, but a month was nothing when every moment of his life since that moment on the bridge had been accompanied by a litany of a Bucky's name drumming at the back of his consciousness, flaring up in a scream in his dreams. Steve guesses he understands Degas a little. Maybe not, Degas hadn't learnt to draw because he'd wanted to copy down the perfect sunrise smile of one of his ballerinas and swallow the paper it was captured on so he could hold it inside of him.

Steve posts them to his online accounts, because he hopes Bucky might see them, if he cared to look.

Steve thinks back to how there had been reports of a man who might have fit Bucky's description loitering at Steve's Smithsonian exhibit everyday for a week before disappearing. He digs out the stack of business cards from curators of various art galleries who had offered to host an exhibition, and makes a few calls.

The exhibition opens two months later. Steve debuts a series of five portraits of Bucky, four years old at their first meeting, that perfect sunrise smile, twelve in an alleyway, moments after he first kissed Steve. Twenty two in a garage, undershirt smudged with grease, careless masculine grace. Twenty five, behind the scope of his rifle, captivating in his intensity. Finally, a miraculous resurrection, walking away from Steve on the bank of the Potomac, his figure shot through with exhaustion but his stance still powerful, the glint of sunlight and fire on his metal arm like the parting of clouds or the sacred glow of a halo, terrible and beautiful and beloved. The exhibition is advertised as the works of Stephen Lagrange, with mentions of Steve's name and past and career, but by contract did not once use the words "Captain America". The pieces are arranged by chronology, and to walk through them would be like a walk down memory lane, until one ended at the final stop, the perfect loving portraits of Bucky in all of his aspects, because for Steve, Bucky was the beginning and end and meaning of everything. That is where Steve stands, under his most loving renditions of half of his soul, holding court with critics and journalists, but really just watching and waiting. Steve stays and waits until everyone but the gallery's staff have left, and isn't disappointed when a man saunters in, the last glass of champagne in hand, with a wan smile as if to say, "well, here I am."

And God damn it, but Steve bawled when Bucky walked up to him, at the end of everything, the end of the line, maybe, dressed in a god damned tux, and pulled him into a hug.  
"Look at you. Mrs Stevie Barnes, a big shot artist." Bucky murmured roughly into his ear. "With your own show and everything."

Bucky had huge purple bruises under his eyes and an emptiness in his gaze that made Steve's heart clench painfully, but he had acquired a tux somewhere that was a reasonable fit, and shaved and trimmed his hair, and there it was, that one damned strand of hair, breaking free and falling in Bucky's eyes as it always did, and Bucky tucks in back behind his ear in that same careless graceful motion, unchanged by time and death and a replacement limb.  
And all Steve could do was clutch him and weep and weep and weep.

("I've still got my heart set on Buck Rogers," Steve mumbled into Bucky's shoulder, and Bucky laughs, low gravelly and shocked, like it was the first time he'd laughed in seventy years. And what do you know, it probably was.)

 

_(Epilogue)_

 

A few months later, a sketch appears on Steve's Tumblr and Flickr. The figure is nude in the morning sun, the line of his back curving sensually, buried in and surrounded by a fluffy duvet. His hair is long, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out it's Bucky when the metal curve of his shoulder shines like rays of light piercing through rain clouds, like soft spring sunshine after a long long winter. It is titled "Bucky Bae", and flippantly captioned "So what's our celebrity couple name?"  
Twitter goes crazy, Tumblr legitimately crashes for an hour. Reporters begin staking out Avengers Tower because they can't find his house. Conservatives and homophobes and his PR team alike start a hunt for his head on a platter, though Marianne and her team call it off after he sends enough cookies and cupcakes to feed a small European nation for a year.  
Steve takes to Twitter, where the hashtags #Starbucks and #Stucky have been battling out for their celebrity couple name, followed in third by #captainfag. He posts a photo of Bucky's naked buttcheeks, the origin of all the debate, on which is delicately balanced a venti starbucks cup. "#Starbucks" he captions it, and hits send.  
After some debate, he follows up with, "I'm not surprised you all like his naked ass better. Not surprised, but still disappointed." And a photo of that painting of him draped suggestively in the American flag.  
Then he turns his phone off and gets back into bed before his PR team has him assassinated.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading  
> Say hi to me on tumblr at sadtrashbuckybarnes.tumblr.com


End file.
